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Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights Watch’

I’m not going to spend the time this morning going tit-for-tat with refugee advocates whose only line of argument, about changes being made in the US Refugee Admissions Program, is to attack the President as a hateful, bigoted, racist boob.

I guess people, like Bill Frelick at Human Rights Watch, assumed the program was running like a well-oiled machine as refugees by the hundreds of thousands (some not even real refugees) were being secretly placed in US communities while the federal resettlement contractors sucked down billions of dollars (including fat CEO salaries) from unwilling taxpayers who they then labeled as, what else, racist Islamophobic boobs, if they dared to question the process.

Is Bill Frelick, in his screed at theLos Angeles Times, saying the program had no flaws and critics like me over the years have been complaining about nothing?

I guess so when he quotes Barbara Strack (retired USCIS refugee bureaucrat) referring to the “assembly line” in a piece entitled:

“The process works like the assembly line in a factory,” Barbara Strack, who retired in January as chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told the New York Times. “This fiscal year, the administration essentially ‘broke’ the assembly line in multiple places at the same time.”

An assembly line shoved down citizens’ throats for nearly four decades!

Yes, they have had an assembly line since shortly after 1980 and that is why the program has created anger and controversy as American citizens, who pay the bills and have to live with the destabilizing results in community after community across America, feel left out and are now asking questions and demanding change.

Elections have consequences.

Frelick and his morally superior pals in the industry should admit there are problems and work to reform the program rather than take cheap shots at the President and his nominee to head the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration.

They won’t though, even if they know deep down that there are problems, because they are one-trick ponies and apparently none are brave enough to break from the Leftist herd mentality.

This time it’s at the New York Times. But, I am out of time to parse this latest news in any depth.

There are two things (among many things) I want you to take note of in this account.

Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch Australia: These men have acute mental health problems and need to be moved (to America?) ASAP. Photo: https://www.hrw.org/about/people/elaine-pearson

First, there is now a debate raging about whether Australia’s detained (failed) asylum seekers from countries now banned by the Trump Administration will be grandfathered in because the deal was first made by Obama in 2016 (and agreed to by President Trump!).

The star of this account is a Rohingya Muslim (most detainees are single Muslim men who tried to break into Australia by boat).

The Rohingya of Burma/Bangladesh are not on the banned list, so expect to see more of them entering the US (as other Muslims from places like Somalia, Iraq and Syria are kept to a minimum).

But, I just couldn’t believe this admission:

Did she really mean to say this?

“If the U.S. isn’t going to accept people from certain countries, they should make that crystal clear now so Australia can make alternative arrangements,” said Elaine Pearson, the Australia director for Human Rights Watch. “There’s no time to waste — these refugees have acute mental health problems made worse by years of uncertainty and insecurity on Manus and Nauru.”

Deal gets dumber every time we hear about it.

Is your town ready for your New Americans: Muslim men who have mental health problems from years in detention with only other men who will be free to roam your neighborhoods!

The Open Borders Left is working overtime this week to make sure the public knows that America is mean and being led by the meanest president in history.

Here is Human Rights Watch spewing forth on something you need to counter every time you hear it.

But, before I get to that: In the first part of this excerpt (below), I learned something that makes sense. Apparently the administration is arguing that we need to clean out the asylum backlog before bringing in more permanent refugees.

It is the second half of the long paragraph that includes a major talking point of the leftwing open borders advocates and refugee contractor groups.

They say that Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan are ‘welcoming’ more refugees than we do.

But, you need to know this:

We give permanent residence and ultimately citizenship (VOTING rights) to those admitted to the US as refugees (or approved asylum seekers), while….

Those migrants housed (“hosted”!) in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have no legal citizenship rights; many can’t even work. They only live there temporarily.

So the next time someone throws out this half truth, please correct him or her (LOL! It could be your US Senator or Congressman trying to spin you!).

The administration has sought to justify the decrease in refugee resettlement by arguing that the United States has a backlog of asylum cases. While Human Rights First has documented the negative impact the backlog has on asylum seekers, the organization notes that even if one combined the number of asylum seekers held up in the backlog and the number of refugees proposed today by the administration, the United States’ overall refugee acceptance per capita would pale in comparison to the numbers of those being hosted in front line states. Turkey hosts 35 refugees per 1,000 individuals, Jordan hosts 89 refugees per 1,000, and Lebanon hosts 173 per 1,000. If the United States were to admit only 50,000 refugees, the rate in the United States would only be less than 1 per 1,000, even when including the asylum office backlog, a dismally small number given the worldwide need.

Here is the truth:

The United States takes more permanent refugees/future citizens than any country in the world!

(2015 numbers because this particular news, where America is shown in a favorable light, is hard to find)

Nothing new! The US has had a religious test for refugees—Jews and some other groups— since 1990, and Frelick knows it!

Also, Human Rights Watch is reporting this week, that the Trump Administration is bad for Muslim refugee admissions.

They are particularly angry with Trump because they claim he is promoting the idea of a religious test (that might favor persecuted Christians!) for admission to the US (gasp!).

Yet they themselves were more than happy to do that very thing—have a religious test—when it came to admitting thousands of Russian Jews and Russian Muslims to the US for over 2 decades!

Here we have Bill Frelick trying to gloss over that fact by suggesting religion was not how they justified their persecution claim. Give me a break!

Here is Frelick:

Historically, the U.S. admissions program has responded to refugees persecuted because of their religious beliefs — recall Soviet Jews, Iranian Baha’is, and Christian “lost boys” of Sudan — but a refugee’s specific faith was less relevantto a person’s rescue than the seriousness of the threat they were under. [What a crock!—ed]

He can’t intellectually (or legally) justify his criticism of a religious test when he and others have been supporting the Lautenberg Amendment since 1990.

Well, they didn’t exactly say that, but that would be the ultimate result if Japan opened its borders to migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

Saving Japan for the Japanese!

Japan, along with a tiny handful of countries has made the decision to fight to maintain its unique JAPANESE culture (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are most visibly fighting for the same thing!) against enormous pressure to invite in the third world .

Every few years (see my Japan archive), pressure builds for the country to take in more than its present handful of refugees. So here we go again!

When looking for solutions to the global refugee crisis, Japan is often identified as a country that could do more. It contributes generously to the United Nations refugee agency but does very little in terms of recognizing asylum seekers in Japan or in resettling refugees stranded, often in terrible conditions, in Thailand, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Hugh Williamson of Human Rights Watch

On a recent visit to Tokyo I raised this issue in meetings with members of both houses of parliament from the ruling coalition. We discussed resettlement. In each meeting, the most awkward moment came when I presented the politician with a list of countries that have resettled refugees, and how many they have accepted. The politician scanned the list, saw that other advanced economies had resettled many thousands of refugees, and noted that Japan’s total was less than 20 per year.

[LOL! I bet they scanned the list and made a mental note that most of the countries on the list are having more crimes and are battling Islamic terrorism while they, in Japan, live in relative peace!—ed]

The current government, like its predecessors, repeats the stance that Japan is not an “immigration country.”

HRW to Japan: you can’t just bring in a handful of Burmese, how about some Muslim Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis to make life more exciting! They have screwed up their own countries and they want a chance to screw up yours!

Hang in there Japan we are cheering for you! You have a right to keep Japan for the Japanese!

Readers, more important, in my opinion, than the so-called ‘travel ban’ portion of the Trump Executive Orders held up in our power-hungry court system, is the issue of the President’s power to set the CEILING on refugee admissions for the year.

My contention is that he has the right to set the CEILING and change the CEILING without any Executive Order.

The Refugee Act of 1980 says only that he must “consult” with Congress on an annual determination. If he changes the number throughout the year (the law envisions a wish to increase the number and is silent on the issue of decreasing it) he must notify Congress.

Since the number set annually is a CEILING (not a target), then there would be no need to even announce any lowering of the number during the year, nor would there have been a need to address a procedure for lowering the incoming numbers in the original law. The Dept. of State and Homeland Security would simply just bring in fewer numbers.

The dirty little secret is that for years, the refugee industry has tried to turn the CEILING in to a target, but at least Frelick is honest.

Frelick of Human Rights Watch(a pro refugee organization) knows that this garbage (the Buffalo story mentioned it again) we keep seeing that there is a minimum 50,000 refugees required under the Act is inaccurate, see what he said here.

It’s the media, the contractors, and the bureaucrat holdovers who are busy bluffing the White House by counting on the fact that no one there understands the program and its history!

And, now as for the missing CEILING data…..

I’ve been following the program since 2007 and Presidents have never reached the CEILING in those years. Obama came pretty close several times, but he was under the ceiling—by huge numbers—in two years in particular.

See this chart (below) from Wrapsnetfor 2006-2016. Pay close attention to the columns for CEILING and the ultimate admission numbers. See the gap! It varies from year to year under the CEILING.

In FY11 Obama set the ceiling at 80,000 and came in with 56,424 (a shortfall of 23,576).

In FY12 Obama’s ceiling was 76,000 and he ultimately admitted 58,238 (a shortfall of 17,762).

Did anyone sue President Obama for leaving thousands “stranded in war-torn countries”? No!

There were NO lawsuits and no screams (at least in public!) from the contractors!

Look at this same chart for the end of March 2017 (at that point Wrapsnet still lists the last CEILING set by Obama (110,000) his highest ceiling by far). I discussed it here.

Now here is the chart for the end of April 2017. I discussed it here. See the note! **FY2017 ceiling is currently in litigation.

Today, I decided to have a look at Trump’s numbers for May because of my earlier post today about the contractors getting excited by increasing numbers coming in, but what did I find when I checked this monthly update?

Can you see what is missing?

Incompetence or an effort to obscure the facts?

Did you see it? They have removed the CEILING column arguably the most useful number from this particular data base.

Why? Is it a deliberate attempt to hide facts? Or, just some dumb mistake by an underling at the Refugee Processing Center(aka Wrapsnet)? You decide.

And, one last thing, for a chuckle, note how extraordinarily high the numbers were for October, November, December of FY2017 compared to the previous ten years. Do you think the outgoing Obama Admin. was in a hurry to pour as many refugees in to your towns and cities as they could before getting out of Dodge? You betcha!

I did my usual end-of-the-week look at Wrapsnet just now. If you are following my updates in the right hand side bar here at RRW, note that as of today we have admitted 44,888 refugees this fiscal year (the FY ends on September 30th).

Checking the numbers this week I was interested to see that only a little over a quarter of the 813 admitted since last Friday are Muslims. The Syrian numbers are way down (18 of the 22 admitted this week are Muslims). We did admit another 57 Somalis, but of the 49 Iraqis admitted, the vast majority (38) are Yezidis. There were zero Iraqi Christians admitted this past week.

I was also interested to see that our Burmese Muslim numbers are growing with 35 admitted this past week (from 5/12-5/19), but of most interest to me was the large number of Muslims admitted during the week from Eritrea (68!).

I have to admit, I’ve never really paid any attention to the flow of Eritreans to the US. We know they are one of the larger groups flooding in to Europe mostly passing through Hillary’s failed state of Libya, but apparently our US State Department is scooping up a fair number of them as well.

Indeed, many question whether the Eritreans are legitimate “refugees” or are they “economic migrants.”

“In refugee law, it can be tricky to draw the line between an economic migrant and someone who is fleeing persecution,” says Felix Horne, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Eritrea is the best example of that…”

Admissions of Eritreans are on the rise in the US

I explored Wrapsnet a bit to see what we have been doing for about the last ten or so fiscal years with Eritreans and sure enough, the numbers we admit are on the rise.

In FY2008 we admitted only 251. That number jumped to 1,571 in Obama’s first year. In 2016 it was 1,949 and, in the first seven and a half months of this fiscal year, the number stands at 1,307.

In the past week, ending this morning, we admitted 90 Eritreans and 68 of those are Muslims. That was the highest ethnic group of Muslims in the week. Are they getting “extreme vetting?”

If we continue to admit 90 a week*** for the remaining weeks of the fiscal year, the Trump Administration could reach 3,000 by September 30th (well above any year during the Obama Administration).

Since FY2007 we admitted 16,897 Eritreans to the US.

There is a lot of useful information in the article I linked above and here from the Council on Foreign Relations if you want to learn more about the Eritrean tide spreading to Europe and America. One of the points that jumped out at me is one we discussed, here, recently.

Note that US dollars sent out of the US economy prop up Eritrea’s economy:

Eritreans in the diaspora also contribute to Eritrea’s economic survival by sending their families remittances, which provide the country with foreign reserves and keep families afloat.

So, as Syrian and Somali refugee numbers decline slightly, we are seeing an increase in Burmese Rohingya Muslims to the US as well as the Eritreans we have featured in this post.

*** Here is the breakdown of the Eritrean refugee admissions for the week of May 12-May 19, 2017 from Wrapsnet:

And, if funds are slashed, the numbers to be resettled in your towns and cities will be slashed because as I have told you ad nauseum the resettlement contractors have little money of their own. They need your tax dollars or they wither and die.

“If [Trump] decides to cut the state funds or federal funds for refugees, refugee resettlement will collapse…” (former Church World Service employee)

Here is what Newsweek has to say about the panic (hat tip: Michael). The article begins with Muslim immigrant fears, then this:

Another point of concern to many Muslim families and others is what will happen to the country’s refugee resettlement program during a Trump presidency, considering his repeated Islamophobic statements during the campaign. [At this point, reporter uses the word ‘Islamophobic’, I went back to see if this was supposed to be straight reporting or an opinion piece! It is supposed to be a straight news story!—ed]

[….]

We’re all afraid. Afraid is probably putting it mildly. Most refugee advocates are really terrified of what’s coming,” says Neil Grungras, executive director of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration (ORAM), a San Francisco-based organization that specializes in helping LGBT refugees. “From a global standpoint, this development could be a real catastrophe.”

Readers, pay attention to this next paragraph. Trump has the power to suspend the program, and to cut the funding (pretty much one and the same!).

Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch. Call me shell-shocked!

During his presidential campaign, Trump said he planned to suspend the Syrian refugee program, which is “fairly easy for him to do because this is discretionary,” says Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch’s refugee program, who described himself as “shell-shocked” when he spoke with Newsweek on Wednesday. “In the U.S., there’s not a quota that has to be filled. The U.S. has a budgeted amount of money to do refugee resettlement, but there’s no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee, and there’s no legal obligation to do it.”

[….]

Whether the entire refugee resettlement program will be shut down is difficult to predict, but I think it’s safe to say that from a policy standpoint, a Trump administration will be looking to limit the number of refugees resettled, and if refugee resettlement continues, it will be from countries that are ‘safe,’” says Joel Charny, director of Norwegian Refugee Council USA.

I had no idea that we were paying the UN for their work of picking our refugees, this is useful information:

In addition to resettling large numbers of refugees, the U.S. is also a key financial contributor to a number of refugee resettlement organizations, including the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). The U.S. gave UNHCR nearly $700 million in the last fiscal year, and more than $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2015. What will happen to those contributions remains unclear; UNHCR did not respond to Newsweek’s request for comment.

[….]

“If [Trump] decide to cut the state funds or federal funds for refugees, refugee resettlement will collapse and we won’t be able to bring in any refugees to this country,” Vidhya Manivannan, a former employee of Church World Service—one of the nine U.S. refugee resettlement agencies—said in an email to Newsweek.

This is a longish article at the Chicago Tribune that anyone concerned with Illinois should have a look at. Any ‘pockets of resistance’in Illinois?

Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch says Syrian Muslims figure low on the list of asylum seekers. Has he ever looked at the stats? Or is he helping promote a victim narrative for the Leftwing media? https://www.hrw.org/about/people/bill-frelick

But, this whining bit (below) jumped out at me and I want to bring it to your attention.

The article implies that Syrian Muslims are not getting into the US in the refugee stream, but that just isn’t true. In 2015, 97% of the Syrians arriving in the US through the State Department’s Refugee Admissions Program are Muslims (the vast majority are Sunnis) coming from UN camps.

We know this from the US State Department’s own Refugee Processing Center data base (if you don’t believe me, see for yourself) where the State Department tracks nationality and religion!

Last week we reported, here in that same post, that Illinois had the 4th highest number of Syrians resettled so far.

Here is a snip below from the Chicago Tribune story. Is Frelick ignorant or purposefully being deceptive and why don’t reporters at these big papers try to find out the truth—that we are bringing mostly Muslim Syrians and NOT the Christians.

Incidentally, we wouldn’t have such a difficult time screening Christians, would we?

But Syrian Muslims figure low on the list of asylum-seekers designated as being of “special humanitarian concern” when U.S. politicians consider applicants from among the world’s 60 million refugees because of fears that would-be terrorists from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, occupying much of northeastern Syria, might slip in among those trying to escape the violence, said Bill Frelick, director of the refugee rights program at Human Rights Watch.

And, what the hell does he mean when he says ‘when US politicians consider applicants.’ What politicians? Does he mean Obama because it is the Administration that actually considers applicants. Sad to say, Congress doesn’t have much of a role in the final decisions (LOL! assuming Congress would have the guts to stop anything anyway).

They talk big—like Rep Michael McCaul, here, but he really doesn’t have much authority to stop Obama short of legislation that could stall the whole process.

We will be watching to see if there is any action by McCaul or other House leaders responsible for refugees—Reps Goodlatte and Gowdy—in the coming weeks.

“If there is even a whiff of a security concern, no consular officer or security officer (from the multitude of U.S. agencies vetting applicants) wants to be the one that has his name on the bottom of a form where someone turns out to have done something horrible,” Frelick said of the asylum-seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries in conflict. “There is every incentive to say no and very few incentives to say yes. This stigma of terrorism, the fear of a needle in the haystack, tends to hold the whole haystack back.”

That is all fine and dandy, but always remember that history tells us that the Jihadist tendency is more likely to rear its ugly head in the next generation as we have seen innumerable times with the Somalis. The parents aren’t the Jihadists, it is the youths that we helped raise with our tax dollars who are radicalized in neighborhood mosques who have turned to Islamic terrorism. It might be 10-15 years before we see the Syrian refugee kids make their move. Why gamble? Save the Christians first.

One final funny note (NOT)! The family which serves as the star of the story (there is always a heartwarming refugee story) has a three-year-old name ‘Osama.’ I think if someone named their kid ‘Hitler’ it would send a message wouldn’t it? Same goes for Osama!